The vibes aren't shifting

Three somewhat disconnected news items from the last couple of days:

• The ICE agents who continue to run roughshod over the Twin Cities area, with little concern for anything other than their own big boy bluster, have accumulated a shocking number of run-ins with various members of the public that culminate in them saying some version of "Haven't you learned your lesson?" in regards to the murder of Renee Good last week.
• Meanwhile, in federal court, U.S. government lawyers found themselves largely unable to answer a judge when asked why citizens who were obeying all traffic laws while following ICE patrols in the Twin Cities should be suspected of criminal activity.
• CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss — who took over the news division late last year and has pushed it in a more conservative direction — is heavily rumored to be frustrated at the fact that people online keep making fun of her and watching her network's flagship broadcast mostly to see if anybody screws up. At the same time, people who work for her keep leaking to the rest of the media that she's not very good at what she does.

A lot has been written about the first year of Trump II as being the first year of a presidency that cares only about generating #content. Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent identified by several news sources as the person who shot Good, was filming their interaction before the shooting. What seems to be the footage from his phone was later leaked to a right-wing outlet and roundly championed by various right-wing commentators — and no less than the Vice President of the United States — as exonerating Ross, less because it made Good seem more like a threat in any sense of the term and more because it made her seem like a "fucking bitch," to directly quote Ross. The leak of the footage, then, was less about proving anything than it was creating a viral moment that would hopefully settle some perceived score.

Similarly, the New York Times reports that at CBS, Weiss has sent out a memo asking that every evening news broadcast have a moment with "viral potential." Setting aside that network evening newscasts were already struggling to feel vital to younger audiences when I was a child, attempting to force virality onto the news is always a dangerous idea, since the news only goes viral because of its packaging when somebody fucks something up. (See, Bari? It's working!)

Yet the more I think about this, the more I think "everything is content" is almost the right frame but also a slightly too limiting one. It suggests a world mediated by screens, to be sure, where the news can be carefully pacified and turned into just another stream of viral moments. But its undercurrent is always "Well, if we could just turn off the social media spigot/everybody's smartphones/the internet, then everything would just get back to normal," a statement that ignores the role of 24-hour cable news networks and talk radio in the buildup to this moment, among other things.

What that statement most ignores is how many of the stories in this moment are less about "good content" and more about forcing a narrative onto the world, then expecting the world to conform to it. We saw a great deal of this in the aftermath of Trump's 2024 election win, when a narrow victory in the popular vote and an admittedly strong victory in the electoral college somehow became equated with a semi-permanent vibe shift and the end of woke or what have you. I'm going to link to this piece, which actually felt like it was grappling with the reality of what it might mean for the vibe shift to be real.

But the bet in politics that will win you the easiest money is always, always, always that the second the new guy takes over, he'll start being blamed for everything people don't like. And Trump's victory was narrow enough that he had plenty of people who voted for him for assorted reasons who were likely to turn on him the second things got even a little bit inconvenient for them, much less once one of the core policy initiatives of the administration became terrorizing random American cities. This is simple human nature. Backlash is one of our core reflexes on some level, and the reflexive reaction the majority of people in this country have to agents of the state terrorizing random people – regardless of those people's identities – is almost always some form of, "Well, don't do that!" Americans are awful in many ways, but integral to our national identity is the very idea of hating being told what to do, a core skill that typically serves us poorly but occasionally gets us out of a real jam.

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The early seeds* of what became our long reactionary nightmare were the various pop culture-driven controversies of the first half of the 2010s, which included a long list of cloistered, irony-poisoned, too-online posters lashing out angrily at a growing sense that the culture had uncentered the voices of straight white men ever so slightly. These controversies began popping up online in the earliest years of the Obama presidency, but they reached their zenith with 2014's Gamergate, an online harassment campaign that tried to mask its core misogynistic impulses with an idea that was very stupid: Games journalists only liked indie games made by women because they were paid to do so. The idea fell apart if you thought about it for more than five seconds, but a lot of journalists who knew how silly the idea was — including this one — still spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the kids were really mad about and why they felt so disrespected by the hobbyist press. Surely they weren't just rank bigots? Surely they were more complicated than that?

(*-"Early" in the sense that if you wanted to write a cultural history of the Trump era, you would probably start there and not with, like, the Atlantic slave trade or the genocide of Indigenous people, both key planks of America's particular form of revanchism but a bit far afield from what such a history would be.)

We're far enough past those events now that you can just say, "Yeah, they were just rank bigots." Yet over the years, I've found myself returning to the "ethics in games journalism" complaint, no matter how ridiculous, because it increasingly seems a lot of these folks really believed it on some level. Like, yes, they were misogynist assholes, but they had a strong tendency to believe everybody else was too, and the only reason the world was giving women the time of day was because it was being paid to do so. If you could find the secret money spigot and turn it off, the world would return to its natural order, one where games were made by and for guys, first and foremost.

This idea — there is some secret switch somewhere that can be flipped to turn off the woke mind rays that keep everyone's bigotry at bay — comes up frequently in the core philosophies of many of the thinkers that animate the Trump right, particularly Curtis Yarvin. It's also barely putting an intellectual gloss atop conspiracy theories along the lines of QAnon, which is to say it's a conspiracy theory and falls apart in the manner of all conspiracy theories, which is to say that it makes no sense.

All of this brings us back to the idea of narrative writ large. Many of these reactionary elements believe that if they could just get the keys for a while, they would be able to forcibly impose a new narrative onto the country, one that would be less kind to anyone who didn't look and think like them and one that would finally reveal them to be the amazing special boys they are. Things like Gamergate were always projection, a certainty that the entire world must behave in the way imagined in the believer's mind because it was the only frame of reference they had. When confronted with, say, rampant evidence of money buying influence and power or a decades-long pedophilic sex crimes ring, these narratives always shift targets because the reality of a thing is always messier and harder to bear than the fiction you have invented for it. I suspect this is a big part of why right-wing folks seem so much more susceptible to AI slop than many — it's a literal machine that will project your preferred reality onto the world, no questions asked.

The core argument here has always been between the two oldest human narratives of all: People are basically good vs. people are basically evil. You can tell a good story built atop either of these narratives because they're true often enough to feel true in a fictional context. But if you try to build a society around "People are basically evil," you run out of gas really quickly. People want to believe they're good, even if they have ample evidence to the contrary, which is why so much of the modern right-wing project involves, like, convincing people that unchecked avarice is good because it's somehow more honest.

But when you try to make your fiction into reality, you inevitably run into the fact that a narrative can only change the culture so much. At a certain point, you are trying to tell a story at the point of a gun, and by then, you've already lost control of the narrative. Yeah, you might impose your will on people for a time, but that will inevitably crumble and be replaced by something more sustainable, which is to say something that gives more people a stake in what sort of story is being told.

Any number of right-wing luminaries from Ben Shapiro to Trump himself have been outed as frustrated artists, people who wanted to make it as screenwriters or comedians or theater producers or [insert profession here] but lacked the necessary talents and so turned to the realm of political influencing. Now that they're trying to rewrite an entire country, it's worth remembering one thing: They are really, really, really bad storytellers.

A Good Song

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